Oil Prices continued their assent today – I’m not going to venture a guess except to say the price of oil is probably going to continue upwards. This is a graph of the price of Oil over the past year:
So we are approaching double the price from a year ago. I found this one tonight – can you believe that five years ago Oil was ~$40 a barrel?
Wow.
May 21, 2008
Just Plain Scary
May 15, 2008
Persistent, Misguided, or just Clueless?
Okay, I tried to let this one go but I just couldn’t. I will expand on my specific reasons for not being interested in InterNAP’s Flow Control Platform (FCP) or by extension their route optimized bandwidth in another post. For now I give you the text from a recent exchange with a Salesperson which started with this message:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to speak with someone about connecting InterNAP to 7012.
> Also, to who is responsible for managing eBGP links among Savvis,
> Hurricane, etc. Please advise.
>
> Ian P. * InterNAP
Remove Hidden Devices from Windows
This week we converted a series of Windows servers to VMWare machines. The VMWare Converter worked perfectly (albeit very slowly). After starting the new VM and installing the VMWare Tools we came across an interesting issue – the IP address was already in use by another NIC in the system, one that we could not see to reconfigure/delete. My initial hack was to just to search the registry and remove the IP address entries from the devices. After some Internet research I found the real solution:
To get rid of that unwanted driver, device, or service:
1. Open the “Start” menu and choose “Run”
2. Type in “cmd” (without the quotes) and click “ok”.
3. At the cmd prompt, type in “set devmgr\_show\_nonpresent\_devices=1″ (without the quotes) and press enter.
4. On the next cmd prompt line, type in “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and press enter.
5. In the Device Manager Console, from the “View” menu, select “Show Hidden Devices”.
6. Uninstall the offending Devices.
I should probably give caution to make sure you know what you are removing before you do it.
May 13, 2008
Uptime
Every now and again I log into a server I haven’t touched in a while and get a pleasant surprise…
>[cthought@server01 ~]$ uptime
> 11:01:01 up 636 days, 18:11, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.11, 2.25
The Razor Conspiracy
Every year Gillette and Schick release a new razor. Usually the bold new improvement is an additional blade either on the face or now because the face is so big on the reverse side to reach the hard spots. With the new design comes increased prices (sure inflation is a factor but not the sole pricing pressure). The razors that I use (Gillette Fusion Manual Razor Cartridges) cost ~$15 dollars for a four pack ($3.75 ea). I usually get four to five shaves out of the cartridge before throwing it out, so $0.75 – $0.94 cents per shave. At what point does the cost of shaving become intolerable?
As a test I purchased a pack of the old disposable packs (Bic Sensitive Shaver) which come in a 12 pack for $3.89. If I use a new razor each day it drops the cost per shave to $0.32, if I can reach a three shave per razor average it drops the cost to $0.11 per shave. I’m interested to see if I even notice a difference in between the razors.
Yes I’m crazy for even thinking about this, but hey we all need our distractions from our daily lives.
May 8, 2008
Geeking out with Neat Receipts
For years now I have kept all of my receipts (or I should say, all of the receipts that I didn’t lose) just in case. Really what that means is envelopes stuffed full of loosely organized paper – the general strategy was when I found a hidden pile of receipts I would put them into whatever envelope was handy and deposit that into my file pedestal. A month or so ago C2 and I were out for drinks with another couple and he was going on and on about his new scanner, this and that and the next thing. We all got a good laugh at the level of geekery that was being displayed.
Fast forward to today. After being haunted by the neat receipt displays in every airport and mall I’ve through I finally broke down and bought one to test out. Two hours later I have every receipt I’ve been able to find so far for the past four years imaged, cropped, categorized and of course the original shredded. Just the experience of eradicating a significant source of clutter in my life has been fantastic. So now of course I’ve been calling and spreading the Neat Receipt geekery to my friends.
May 7, 2008
Apple Question Mark Folder of Death
Last week my Macbook froze, and I mean really froze. The kind of crash that requires you to unplug the power and pop the battery out. Unfortunately with the frozen computer resolved I was faced with a new problem – when rebooting the system displayed the dreaded blinking question mark folder. A call to Apple Care (yes I bought the warranty) confirmed what Google had already told me – that this hard drive was dead.
As an aside, this is apparently some sort of know massive manufacturing defect affecting a significant amount of the OEM drives for Apple.
The Apple Care agent was a riot. The quote was something like, “well I’ve only heard of one or two systems coming back from this error”. Kudos to Apple for having the telephone support center in Indiana (as in the State of Indiana). Unfortunately this is where my praise for Apple support ends. My option was either to ship my Laptop to some unknown place or go to an Apple store for a repair. The agent offered to make me an appointment (a two day wait would be the earliest available) I declined and opted to try my luck as a walk in.
The Genius Bar was a mob scene – you wouldn’t believe how many people were waiting to be taught how to use their iPhone. The Concierge confirmed that it was a two day wait for an appointment and went on to elaborate that it would take an additional one to two days to replace the hard drive from that point. After rolling my eyes and expressing my dismay (I think my exact quote was “two days to replace a hard drive”) I opted for plan B.
Plan B in this case was the purchase of a nice shiny new laptop hard drive from the local MacMall. I’m sure I could have saved a couple bucks online but there is nothing quite like instant gratification. The hard drive access was very convenient and all in all took maybe five minutes to swap out. What I am most impressed with is Time Machine.
Apple really knocked it out of the park with Time Machine, I’d go as far as saying it is one of the most important applications developed by Apple. Why? Quite simply because it is the first backup application I have seen targeted to the consumer that works flawlessly – simple to version, simple to go back in time to a previous backup, simple to restore a file/directory, and simple to restore the entire system. If you are using a Mac and are not backing it up – you deserve to lose all of your data.
